Early in Rush’s career, Geddy Lee’s enunciation often left something to be desired. My copy of their Fly by Night album was a pirated cassette tape, so I had no lyric sheet. And so I heard the chorus of “Beneath, Between & Behind” as:
Beneath the noble fir
Between the brown-haired squirrel
Behind the beauty racks of beer
I realized at the time that the second line made no sense at all. But for the second line, I first heard the song around the same time Doug & Bob Mackenzie were popular, and they frequently used the slang, “beauty” in the sense of “cool”, and they talked about beer a lot, so I assumed I was just hearing Canadian slang in the song. Nevertheless, I think I realized that the line still didn’t make much sense in the context of the song’s verses.
Correct lines:
Beneath the noble bird
Between the proudest words
Behind the beauty, cracks appear
Actually, I have a new one, but it was my mishearing.
The Tom Waits song “Georgia Lee” is a mournful ballad about a young girl dying unnecessarily - whether from overdose or murder is not quite clear. There’s a repeated chorus -
*“Why wasn’t God watching
Why wasn’t God listening
Why wasn’t God there
for Georgia Lee?”*The first time I heard it, I clearly heard the last chorus as: …Why wasn’t I there…
And that’s still how I prefer to sing along.
ELO’s “Last Train to London”. As a kid my mom played ELO a bunch, and I didn’t know the title of the song, and I’m pretty bad at hearing correct lyrics. So when the titular part of the lyric came up, what I heard instead was “Let’s Drink to Luna”. Seemed to fit pretty well to me, right? He was hanging out with a pretty woman at a party and he was using the moon as an excuse to sit around and drink with her some more, or something.
On a simpler note, in “Four Little Diamonds” I thought it was “And if the Lord don’t get her then I will” instead of “And if the law don’t get her then I will”. Seemed a bit dark. The option of going to hell or whatever he would do seemed like a worse thing to wish on her than getting arrested or whatever he would do.
The funny thing was, I understood the lyrics of the verses perfectly. There was just something about the way he enunciated the words of the chorus that fooled me. I was probably 13-14 years old at the time, and I had grown up with noble fir trees, while I had never heard a bald eagle referred to as “noble bird”, so that mishearing is understandable.
Mistaking “proudest” for “brown-haired” … all I can figure is that “P” and “B” require similar mouth movements, as do “D” and “N”. Toss a bit of an accent in there, and the sounds can be confused. Then my young brain probably realized that “brown-haired words” would make even less sense and subconsciously substituted a word that both rhymed (well, if you pronounce it “squirl”) and could be brown-haired.
